Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.

Neil Patel

The idea is to, when customers are ready to make any buying decision, they will already be loyal to your product and brand and most likely, prefer your product over your competitors.

Content Strategy 101

Content marketing success relies on its content strategy framework. A content marketing strategy based on your marketing and sales objective keeps your align with your ultimate goals like traffic, audience engagement, and sales while finding the best way to keep your customer’s actively engaged with your content and brand.

Focus on the ultimate goal

You need to set your content marketing goal at the very first. It could be brand awareness, social sharing and engagement or lead generation and in-store sales.

Map out your buyer persona

After finding out your ideal customer profile also known as buyer persona. It’s time to map out their interest and need.

What interests them?

What are their passionate about?

Who do they follow (influencers)?

What challenges do they face?

How can you help them give a good experience or lead a better lifestyle?

Be Authentic

Though your ultimate goal is to drive brand awareness and product sales by content marketing. The key rule of content marketing is to put your content first. You need to tell stories that are useful, relevant and entertaining to your audience. Educating your audience and providing value should be the core of your content marketing. If you put your product first in every content, they will lose the trust at the beginning.

Act like a publisher

You need to behave like a media house or a publisher to showcase your content marketing effort. One of the early examples is The Guinness Book of Records.

The founder of Guinness Breweries started a publication comprising the World Records in 1955 to ultimately entertain and educate their ideal buyer and eventually boost their lost sales of alcoholic beverages.

Create an editorial calendar

More like a Marketing Calendar, the planning process starts with creating an editorial calendar. You need to set up a disciplined process that clearly maps out your content cadence and schedule while you are able to map out the topic much easier.

You can set up an editorial calendar on Google Calendar or you can also use a simple spreadsheet like Google Doc to make it out. Similar to this marketing calendar 2019 Bangladesh which we created in Google Calendar.

Invest in training your writers and creators

While you need an editor to manage your content creation process. You should definitely train him/her and the other content creator / freelancers so they understand why they are creating the content while keeping the end-goal in their mind. The team should equally be responsible to not only creating content, but also distribution and measuring multiple KPI’s (social shares, lead collected).

Make Content at Scale

You need to be real here. Creating completely new and authentic content is not just time consuming, but also not tested in real life. That is why you need to create a good blend with the content you’re producing for your platform (website, social, blog).

Create Content for every stage

The early stage: Awareness is consists of Top-of-the-funnel content like eye-catching videos, infographics, data, and actionable lists.

Take a look at this social content from a leading brand Teer in Bangladesh that resemble the awareness stage. This type of content works well, when audience has little or no interest in your product.

The mid-stage: Consideration is consists of Industry oriented content, analysis, reports, guides (like this!) to help the audience solve a problem. It happens when the audience has little interest in your product/ brand.

The last stage: Decision happens when your audience has a strong interest in your product or services. You need to create, customer case studies, product guide, testimonials and reviews, service-specific information to get sales.

Think Backward

While it’s important to create content for your every sales stage. In order to see the result of your marketing effort, you need to look back and evaluate how each content contributed to your ultimate goal of meeting KPI’s. Which content gets more traffic, which content gets more newsletter signup and which content get more lead/ customer conversion.

Do not think your content as an individual piece. You need to bind them in one loop and each piece of content should contribute for your final marketing goal. A pillar strategy in your content creation process may help you to focus on a specific service and build multiple, yet relevant content around same topic.Inspire through design

This is just a basic framework for your content marketing need. If you’re looking to craft the full content marketing strategy for your business in Bangladesh and other countries that can create a rock-solid brand identity for your business and generate leads and footfall for days to come, contact us.